Thursday, October 2, 2014

Bit at a time Bible Hebrew -- how does it sound?

Now for a culture capsule.

Shabbat always always always comes
every seven days.That means the first
Shabbat as well as all the ones after it.So there had to be six days – six and only six – days and not weeks or
months – of creation before the first Shabbat.That is why the Bible counts six days when things were created before
Shabbat – which was also created.If
Shabbat occurred every seven months, I believe the Bible would have listed
things as being created in the six months before that.Remember, the Bible comes from the Jewish
culture.

There are seven days of creation,
the seventh being Shabbat which, like everything else, had to be created.

The chapter divisions were created
by a Christian in the 1200s CE.The
Bible existed for centuries before that and the Jews divided it into books,
which were divided into large sections for reading on Shabbat.The large sections, the Parshot, were divided
into 8 small sections called aliyot because of the accompanying ritual.

So the natural Jewish way of
dividing Genesis has an aliyah that ends with chapter 2 verse 3,
which is the last verse about the creation of Shabbat.With verse 4, it starts a new aliyah.

To hear how the aliyah sounds,
listen to the First Reading at this website.Find the boldface word Bereshit at the top of
the page and click the little speaker symbol on the right of it.

There is an English
translation.You can also listen to each
verse individually.When the audio ends,
you have heard the first aliyah.

This website gives the sing-song
chant used in synagogue services to read the Pentateuch.The text in Hebrew will look different from
the lessons on this blog; there are extra little symbols you haven’t seen
before.They are called trop and
they record how to chant the words.

Now I’ll blow your mind.When Jews read Pentateuch on Shabbat in
synagogue, they do it from a scroll and the scroll doesn’t have these little
symbols.It doesn’t even have the vowel
signs.The person reading aloud has to
memorize how to pronounce the words and how to chant them.The audience listens carefully and may have a
copy with all the symbols to refer to.They are expected to shout out corrections when the reader goes
wrong.So synagogue readings can be
noisy if the reader doesn’t know what he’s doing but if he does, the audience
still sometimes chants along with him.